The inventive concept relates generally to electronic memory technologies. More particularly, certain embodiments of the inventive concept relate to memory controllers and related techniques that can be used to manage data storage.
Nonvolatile memories are widely used in a variety of products such as mobile telephones, smart phones, digital cameras, and personal digital assistants (PDAs), to name but a few. Flash memory is a relatively popular form of nonvolatile memory due to attractive features such as relatively high storage capacity, relatively low power consumption, and an ability to withstand physical shock.
One shortcoming of flash memory is that it has limited endurance, meaning that its memory cells will wear out after a certain amount of use. To address this shortcoming, researchers have devoted considerable effort to developing techniques to reduce the effects of wear on the memory cells, such as wear leveling and other forms of data management.